


Five Homes

by apodiopsys



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-20
Updated: 2011-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 01:38:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/290250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apodiopsys/pseuds/apodiopsys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Dean has had five official homes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Homes

His mother cuts the crusts off of his bread. She’s soft, she’s warm, she’s good. She smells like perfume and bread and sunshine, and one of Dean’s favorite things is her smile. She smiles when he brings her a bouquet of flowers, even when he pulled them out of her flower garden to make it. On Sundays she makes cookies, four dozen batches of chocolate chip cookies that make the whole house - kitchen, living room, bedrooms, basement - smell _sweet._ The scent of sugar and flour and chocolate clings to her for a few days afterwards, and when Dean presses his face into her hair he can smell it there, lingering.

When she isn’t looking, he sneaks into the nursery; he sneaks into his old nursery, the one that was _his_ until his baby brother came along. Daddy gave him a new room after that, with yellow walls and says, “Big boys get their own rooms.” Dean doesn’t miss the nursery, not really. He’s a big boy now, four years old, and he doesn’t need the pale blue walls and the stuffed bears and the angels. He’s glad that Sammy gets it, and when his mom is laying down for a nap in the afternoon ( _“Just fifteen minutes, Dean, then we can play.”_ ) he sneaks into the nursery, poking his fingers in between the bars of the crib that Sam is sleeping in and whispers made-up stories about super heroes that save the day. Sometimes, Sammy’s fingers - so tiny, Dean doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything that small - curl around his own index finger, and he feels a flood of warmth and thinks that he’ll never let anything hurt his little brother.

Dean plays with his cars on the sun-warmed driveway in front of their house, rolling them back and forth and making loud noises with his mouth when he crashes two cars together. John pulls up to the house after work and kneels, sitting on the floor next to his son. He takes one of the cars and they play with them together in the dying September sunshine.

 **Uncle Bobby’s**

Dean is a sullen eight year old who climbs out of the backseat of the impala, scuffing his sneakers on the gravel and holding tightly to his little brothers hand. The house they’re facing is old and worn down: badly in need of a paint job. His clothes are a few sizes too big for him, jeans belted at the waist and hoodie sleeves hiding his hands. Dad wants him to be able to grow into his clothes, because boys grow fast and they don’t have the funds to buy new threads every time they grow a few more inches. Sam’s palm is sweaty but Dean doesn’t let go, not when Dad herds them up the front steps to stand next to his legs when he rings the bell and not when a man wearing a checkered shirt and a trucker’s hat answers the door.

“Boys, you can call him Uncle Bobby,” is Dad’s way of introduction. They both say their _g’days_ and then they’re excused out into the yard - because the adults need to talk _business_. Dean finds a stick and teaches Sam his alphabet, draws an A for apple and a B for bear. He shows him the letters for Sam and watches as his little brother shapes his name into the dirt.

Dad leaves them there for a few weeks and Dean resents him for it at first. He doesn’t think he’s coming back, but then he gets to stay up past ten and watch whatever he wants on Uncle Bobby’s TV - even though the reception is bad and the screen flickers, he’ll stay up way past his bed time watching movies that he shouldn’t. And more often then not, Sam creeps downstairs out of his bed and joins Dean, head in his lap and thumb in his mouth, and that’s usually how Bobby finds them, curled up together on the rug in front of a television that hasn’t been turned off.

They eat a lot of sandwiches (sans crust for both of them) and spend their days playing hide and seek inside and outside of the house. Sam learns to read simple things and Uncle Bobby slowly teaches Dean about the cars in his salvage yard.

They have to leave three weeks later, when Dad comes back, beaten and bloody but smiling. Neither Dean nor Sam want to go, but they’re given Dad’s stern face and a gruff, _Boys_ , as a warning. Sam cries and hugs Uncle Bobby’s rottweiler goodbye. Dean is less emotional - because big boys don’t cry - but he gives Uncle Bobby a hug and waves out of the back window from the impala. Bobby tells them not to be strangers, and they promise not to be and wish hard that they didn’t have to leave.

 **The Impala**

On days when funds are low and they’re in the middle of nowhere and Dean is falling asleep at the wheel, they pull over onto the shoulder of the road and sleep in the backseat, under blankets that Dean keeps for times exactly like this. In the winter when it’s cold they pile under the blankets and curl against each other, fitting together similarly to the way they did when they were twenty years younger and still had the innocence of the world behind them. Their skin presses together and they wake up sleepy and warm.

They drive sometimes fifteen hours a day, more often then not Dean at the wheel of his baby. In the summer he plays music up high with the windows down low, and Sam makes faces in the passenger seat, pleas to turn the music down drowned out by guitar rifts and bass lines. More often than not the air conditioning doesn’t work properly and when they’re down south on cases it’s like breathing water the humidity is so strong. They usually stay towards the North and West coast during the warmer months of the year.

After battles with the supernatural they tend to wounds while sitting on the hood - standing next to the impala, by the trunk, sitting inside the cabin. Sam has stiched Dean’s shoulder after a demon ripped it open and Dean has set broken bones and sprained muscles countless times. He’s spent hours cleaning drips of blood out of the upholstery.

Dean takes people back to the Impala, girls and guys who are easy on the eyes and easier in the backseat of his car. For the record, Sam takes them too but he’s pickier about it than Dean is, taking fewer with longer periods of time in between. Sometimes they take each other in the backseat, when they’ve had enough tequila after a particularly hard hunt and need the heat of another person to prove that everything is still real. They don’t talk about if afterwards - not usually, not ever - and by mid morning the following day the Impala has put hundreds of miles between them and the last hunting ground.

 **Lisa**

At first Dean tries to resist it. It’s not something - this domesticity - isn’t something he’s ever openly admitted to wanting, and he especially didn’t want it like _this_ , not with Sam disappearing into the pit with Michael and Lucifer. The problem though, is that he does want it, with every fiber in his being. Dean _loves_ most of it, loves the fact that he doesn’t wake up in danger of being killed, loves that he has a (kind of) nine to five job, loves that he has a permanent roof over his head and a bed to sleep in. He loves that he can make omlettes or pancakes or waffles for breakfast, that he can create any kind of pasta dish that his heart desires for dinner.

In a way, he doesn’t miss hunting. Dean misses the way they travelled though, miles and miles and miles of open sky and fields and road between where they’ve been and where they’re going. Most of all, out of everything that Dean does miss (the bars, hustling pool, the girls, the _adrenalin_ ), Dean misses Sam. He misses his baby brother, annoying and geeky and so so smart, the one who’s almost always had his back, no matter what, no matter when.

Dean turns into Mr. Soccer Dad and he loves it. He loves kicking a ball around with Ben in the backyard, throwing a football in the park. They have barbecues with the neighbors on the weekend, cooking hotdogs and burgers and ears of corn over a grill, the way that Dean had wanted and envied of every other American until he was fifteen and learned to know better. On top of everything else he has a “dudes” night with Lisa’s friends husbands: they bowl and they play poker and darts and drink beer and talk about Phil from accounting.

He doesn’t sleep a full night for the first six months he lives with Lisa; waking up in cold sweats after nightmares of Hell. He dreams about his time in Hell, torturing people the way Alistair told him to, and he dreams about Sam in Hell, and it terrifies him to think about what Michael and Lucifer could be doing to him in their cage. It wears down though, and he manages to sleep through a whole night, and eventually two nights in a row. It doesn’t last and Lisa gets used to Dean sitting up in the dark and fumbling under his pillow for the silver knife he keeps there _just in case._

 **Sam**

Dean doesn’t realize that it’s Sam that he’s wanted and needed forever until he comes back. Even though he’s different he’s still Sam and Dean realizes that seeing his brother is like _breathing_ for the first time in over a year. And even without a soul there’s still a Sam-ness about him that intensifies and increases tenfold when he gets his soul back, and Dean has never been so proud to call his little brother his.

Being away from Lisa is easy, easier when he’s turned into a vampire and attacks Ben by accident. It’s easier to make excuses to them over the phone - about being too far away, about being caught up in a case - while Sam’s mouth touches his skin, sucks on his fingers, marks his neck.

They spend less time hunting, more time in motels, getting them with one bed and staying up all night and sleeping all day. Dean feels like he’s a teenager again, crazy in love and his world is tipping on it’s axis, spinning in a new direction because Sam has always been the center of his universe, ever since he was old enough to take care of him by himself, but he’s never been the center of it quite like _this._ In the early morning, when Sam is lying on his front sleeping and Dean is still awake, he thinks of all the things that the Great Wall of Sam is blocking out and he’s never been so grateful for the supernatural and their abilities and knack for pulling him and Sam in and out of Heaven and Hell like yoyo’s.

He memorizes Sam’s skin - Sam’s body, Sam’s mouth - the way he knows his guns. He spends hours upon hours upon hours mapping it out, learning every freckle and scar that decorates his back and chest and legs like medals.

Above everything else, Dean feels most at ease when he’s in the impala and Sam is next to him, corn fields streaming past the windows in blurs of gold and yellow. He has his elbow propped up on the open window, other hand resting on the steering wheel and Sam pretends to be annoyed at the music but really, really this is exactly them, exactly where they are and where they need to be.  



End file.
